


returning to the scene of the crime

by lapsi



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Alcohol, Closeted Character, F/F, Flirting, Post-Season/Series 02, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 09:56:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21269150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsi/pseuds/lapsi
Summary: Wendy self-examines and then is examined in turn.(uh basically I miss Debbie.)





	returning to the scene of the crime

**Author's Note:**

> (All I can write right now is some yearning and flirting and the horrific predator-like feeling of being a wlw but hey, someone might want to read this.)

Wendy is drunk, in a wholly understated way. Aware of her own impeded mental faculties, a heady, liminal space of conscious intoxication. Certain she won’t misstep into recklessness; certain she’s already misstepped to be where she is. An alleged ‘happy hour’, though the displays of emotion around are surely too raucous and animalistic to be accurately termed happiness. A smoke-shrouded, orange heat. A body-to-body, loneliness-obliterating throng. Recently-awoken students muddled with blue-collar workers finishing long and unrewarding shifts. It’s the precise sort of bar that Kay would work at, but does not. Wendy’s well aware of  _ that _ barely-subconscious decision: leaving work after nine P.M. and haphazardly recreating a meet-cute that hasn’t materialised. Wendy examines herself critically, but distantly. She hasn’t spoken to anyone, hasn’t done much else but order four-- no, is it  _ five _ glasses of wine? The bartender is ...not Kay. A young blond man with an unconvincing beard. But Wendy didn’t want Kay. She wanted Kay-adjacent. Her subjects return to the scene of a crime, but she isn’t quite as deviant as them. She isn’t reliving the first thrill of returned affection, she’s indulging a parallel fantasy.   
  
_ That’s what you’re telling yourself?  _ chimes in a snarky, sober shade of herself. She swills the cheap wine around her mouth and finds it perfectly amenable and appropriate to her situation and state. She feels cheap, here. Cheap and predictable and clichéd. The career woman drinking her way through a break-up. No friends or family to call. Wendy hates to self-pity, but she can and does self-flagellate for these moments of weakness.   
  
She’s trying to steer the disdain away from herself and back to the wine at her lips (Californian chardonnay: drab, over-oaky) when with a jolt she realises that her moment of spiteful self-examination is not so private after all. She’s being openly observed by a young woman. Make-up darkened doe eyes framed about with messy hair. Now, rising from the bar, pressing straight in her direction through a stagnant swirl of patrons.   
  
“Doctor Carr, right?” the woman identifies her.    
  
Wendy nods without full recognition, fearing a relocated Bostonian student. Dressed like a student: an overall style denim dress that could only be worn braless, a flimsy silver chain nestling like a viper in the dip of her neck. Then the woman swiped back the choppy, sweat-frizzed hair tickling her cheekbones-- a less professional mirror of Wendy’s religiously adhered hair styling-- and Wendy knows her. The association is not particularly pleasant. Dinner, with a co-worker she’d had higher hopes for.   
  
“How’s the study going?” Holden’s pretty girlfriend asks with genuine interest. ... _ Debbie? _ Debbie. And then the implications of the inquiry occur to Wendy. Pretty  _ ex _ -girlfriend. You could cut out Holden’s tongue and it wouldn’t stop him talking about his work. They must no longer be in contact.   
  
Wendy pulls herself conference keynote straight as she considers her answer. She’d have a polite and politic answer, for most people. Something about the privilege of working within such a stalwart institution, gently alluding to the confines of bureaucracy and the unrealistic expectation of breakneck empirical results from an in-progress scientific analysis. But this is someone whom Holden likely relentlessly confided in, so Wendy is uncharacteristically blunt: “The study is yielding complex, but very compelling results. Then those results are being hurried into fieldwork application in a way that is both sloppy and premature.”   
  
“Being applied by Holden in a way that is sloppy and premature?” asks Debbie knowingly. There’s an encouraging smile, but the young woman is wholly unreadable as she leans back into the booth opposite.   
  
Wendy has momentary concerns that she’s herself made some Ford-esque unfounded leaps of logic. Maybe the break-up wasn’t such a surety as--    
  
“I’ll take the silence as a ‘yes’. He was pretty trigger happy way back when,” Debbie indicts.    
  
She’s eloquent enough, but imperfectly composed, and Wendy thinks she smells marijuana. Possibly. She’s going off a lone recollection of an undergrad house party. Wendy had shirked such hedonistic social engagements for voluntary research assistant jobs and endless library hours. Nothing was getting in the way of her academic streamline towards that elusive female psychological doctorate.   


Debbie doesn’t seem quite so one-track in her vocation.  _ Vocation? Is that from Ed Kemper? Or is that from Holden, from Ed Kemper? _   
  
The young woman is filling the silence again. “Can’t imagine his blind conviction now, especially after Atlanta-- I mean, it was all over the news--” she says, as if to assure Wendy of her lack of immediate interest in Holden Ford.   
  
They  _ have _ broken up. Wendy marks off a triumph of her own deductive reasoning in an entirely petty way.  _ Assistant Director _ Gunn should see her now. Maybe then he’d allow her to do the interviews she’s wholly capable of. See how her own _ “instincts” _ stack up against Holden’s.   
  
Debbie goes on: “Anyway. I’m sorry, if that’s the case. Misappropriated research is how you get disasters like Socarides, or--”   
  
Wendy feels a cold jolt at the name.   
  
“--ah, sorry,” Debbie says, gritting her teeth for a second.   
  
Wendy thought she was impervious and unresponsive to the name of that hateful, homophobic son of a bitch. Apparently not after five glasses of wine. She gave something away. Debbie seems apologetically silenced.   
  
Wendy begins to remember Debbie. They had dinner, didn’t they? Bright, intellectually engaging, far too sophisticated for Holden. ...sociology postgrad? Smart. Smarter than Holden, if she’s figured out  _ that _ already. “Yes. His methodology has always been extremely flawed, where there is any methodology to speak, and not simply unfounded speculation,” she says. A horrible thought occurs to her, too late, that this insight is indirect. Did Holden say something? Could _ he _ know?   
  
“Not exactly my area,” Debbie says, more considered. “I was studying Evelyn Hooker. Psychology, but broad sociological implications in regard to deviancy. Anyway, my advisor mentioned Socarides’ recent remarks, and--”   
  
“Your advisor?” Wendy says, feeling momentarily protective of the young woman who has slid into the booth opposite. In Wendy's inadvertent imaginings, the advisor looks an awful lot like Annalise.   
  
“She’s a sociology doctorate at GWU, Doctor Fielding? She’s helping steer me towards more radical examinations of deviance; I’m really into Routine Activities Theory right now, I don’t know if you’ve read it, Cohen and Felson?”   
  
Wendy shakes her head, wondering if she’s being angled at for a job. _Surely_ not. Not with Holden working alongside her.   
  
“I think the exploration of rational deviance is very applicable to the work you were doing. The demystification of violent criminal acts, the baseline assumption that most offenders are operating in the pursuit of self-interest, it’s all a much more constructive framework than approaching criminal deviance with knee-jerk revulsion, or dehumanization, or othering of the perpetrators. ...I mean, it fails to capture motivation to the degree I’d hope for in a overarching theoretical framework, but-- but it’s cool. It’s really cool,” she eventually equivocates, in an apparent stab of self-consciousness. A fleeting furrow of bold, brushstroke-shaped brows. Perhaps feigned self-consciousness; demonstrating both over-enthusiasm in the subject matter, then deference to her conversational partner. _...that’s too cynical,_ Wendy reprimands herself.   
  
Wendy decides two things: firstly, that this woman is trying to impress her within the social paradigm, not for some buried utilitarian reasoning. Wendy recalls her own heavy-handed attempts to insert pet academic obsessions into polite conversations. With Annalise, when she didn’t quite understand why she needed this beautiful older woman to approve of her. With plenty of other women and men whom she respected as scholars and desperately needed reciprocal indications that she was smart and well-researched enough to deserve her foothold within Boston University.   
  
The second thing that Wendy concludes is that this ruthless show-boating would be just the thing to snare Holden’s attention. Wendy admits she sees the attraction. Debbie is very pretty, in that Manson-family-waif way. Young. Impressionable yet challenging. There’s an ugly nostalgia to Wendy’s speculative analysis-- a warped rerun of a not-yet-doctor Wendy Carr sitting in a college bar trying to earn Annalise’s approval by regurgitating swathes of Neal Miller’s work on the Frustration-Aggression hypothesis. Debbie isn’t wanting the sort of approval Wendy subconsciously edged towards achieving, certainly. But approval, nonetheless.   
  
“That certainly sounds pertinent. We deal with a lot of offenders who exhibit extreme awareness of their own personal goals and an understanding of how the violent acts they commit may further them. ...also non-violent acts. Press correspondence. Increasingly, we examine the differential of rewards and deterrents for each act with the assumption of some form of rationality from the offenders. They want to avoid punishment, sure. But, they want pleasure.” Wendy’s sure she’s thinking too much of Kay and of Annalise. The syllables brush her lips like the peachfuzz of bare skin.   
  
The young woman’s gaze is both at Wendy and beyond her. Debbie doesn’t reply for several seconds; there’s a re-invasion of crowd-buzz and over-amplified rock music to Wendy’s senses. Then Debbie leans in, and her contralto tone is the only thing Wendy can hear. “But you still need to decide whether there’s innate desire for deviance. Or if it might be attributed to circumstance or upbringing.” She blinks kohl dark eyelids like a stirred housecat.   
  
Wendy, wine glass halfway back to the table, twitches it into a toast of agreement. “Rational all the way down until you hit the murky underlying motivations,” she murmurs. She sets down the wineglass, and to her surprise, Debbie’s hand shoots across the table.   
  
Her fingers brush across Wendy’s like bright static. Her nails are trimmed, with beautiful almond-round nailbeds, and her skin is summery sticky. Wendy tenses without withdrawing.   
  
“That’s the hard part. Knowing what people want,” Debbie says, perhaps apologetic. Their hands still rest together.   
  
“I--” Wendy starts.   
  
“I want--” Debbie begins too, then looks down.   
  
“Tell me what you want,” Wendy instructs, finding a sick thrill in the switched dynamics from her own recollections. She’s in a warm, tantalising, familiar hell. She has become her own monster, now. Her fingers tenderly ensnare Debbie’s. A tabletop caress, concealed only by dim lighting and that swaying, impersonal chaos around them.   
  
But there’s no guileless blush from the young woman opposite. Debbie’s stare is unflinching and her smile is sharp as nighttime thunder. Triumphant and intent. A merciless actress finally dropping that docile foreplay. “I want you to finish your glass of wine so we can leave this bar.”


End file.
